Saturday, April 30, 2016

You may need to rethink your definition of a camera

An iPhone 6s and a Kodak Brownie from 1900 work essentially the same way. You hold it up, compose your shot and push a button to take a photo.

One could argue the 21st century has been a revolution for photography. Most of us have a phone in our pockets. There is no longer a cost-per-shot, where every time we click a picture there is an associated cost of film, developing and printing. We now can take thousands of shots on a vacation, where before we may have limited ourselves to 36 -- both a blessing and a curse.

And how we share our photos has changed. We no longer have photo albums or slideshows we have to convince people to peruse. We share our photos online. But the camera in our phone is still a point and shoot camera, as was that early Brownie.

Until now.

There is now a type of camera where you do not compose your shot, because it takes a photograph of everything, a complete 360 degrees around you. It gets everything, including you, what’s in front of you, behind you, above you and the ground you are standing on. There is no viewfinder, because your photo is not limited to what you see in the viewfinder.

We bought one a while back. I thought it would be a good way for my wife to take discreet street shots on her trip to Israel. You just hold it above your head, or to the side, and click a button. The device itself looks like a TV remote.

Ours is a Ricoh Theta S, at the time the only one on the market. In the last couple of months others have come on the market, such as the LG Cam for $199. Samsung has also announced one that should ship soon, but there is no pricing for it yet.

These are for consumers. There is also a large array of higher-priced models for those doing serious virtual reality. Some of these cost tens of thousands of dollars.The Eye high end camera rig

Obviously you cannot print out a 360-degree image, but you can display it on the web. This week’s link post at FamilyTechOnline.com has several we took with our Theta S.

Sample 360 degree photos taken by Mark Stout

(Drag in an image to move around in image)Church of the Holy Sepulchre

If you have a virtual reality headset, even Google’s inexpensive Google Cardboard, you can view a 360 degree image in it. As you turn your body while looking through the headset, the image moves too.

Technology is changing how we shoot video too. The cameras mentioned above also shoot video. You can store your 360 videos on YouTube. It is now even possible to livestream 360 shows.

Sample 360 Videos from YouTube

Scene from The Jungle Book

Roller Coaster Ride

High tech is also changing other aspects of video. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, showed the Mevo at its latest developers’ conference.

The Mevo is a small camera you set on a desk or on a tripod. It shoots 150-degree video. What makes it interesting is it’s an iPad app. It shows the complete video and records it. A user taps on a face in the video and the image will become a close-up of that person. The Mevo shoots 4K high-resolution video so even though a small portion of the image is enlarged to make the close-up, the image is still sharp.

The Mevo would be wonderful for shooting a school play, a child’s athletic event, a meeting, or even your own TV show. It would be as if you had your own multiple-camera TV studio like your local TV station has, or networks use to tape shows like The Big Bang Theory, but all for under $500.

About Mevo video :

If you want true multi-camera production ability on a shoestring, there is a $5 app in the Apple app store called RecoLive. It links together iPads or iPhones all using their own camera. The video feeds are sent to one central iPad via wifi. That central iPad is shooting the scene with its own camera too.

The iPad shows all the videos coming from it and the other devices. A user acts as a director and chooses which video shot to record at a given moment. When they want to switch to another shot, they can choose the transition to use. For example, they can choose the wipe transition so it appears the new image pushes the old shot off the screen.

This means that for the cost of three iPads at say $500 each and three copies of the app at $15 total, a user can have a three camera setup with video switching. That same capability used to be only available for TV stations at a cost of over $1 million.

As an experiment, some of the links normally kept on the Links post were integrated into this column.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Several years ago I scanned my father’s slides of my siblings and me growing up. Dad had put together a nice presentation of photos of our lives, and maybe once a year we’d sit down and enjoy a slide show.

I noticed how few photos there were of Dad. He had been the self-appointed family photographer.

That is a role that no longer exists. Now, on a family vacation or outing, all family members over the age of 10 seem to have their own camera.

How do we keep those photos from being in their own universe, and make them truly family photos? I wrote about one possible solution three years ago, and a How-To blog post I wrote to go with that column remains the No. 1-read post at FamilyTechOnline.com.

That solution used Dropbox, that give you so much free space and hope you will buy extra space as needed. Photos take up a lot of room, so my solution most likely had most users needing to purchase Dropbox space.

When my son and I planned our Israel trip, I rethought this problem. Google Photos lets you store an unlimited number of photographs for free. The photographs stored at their original quality if they are 16 megapixels or less. Otherwise, the service downgrades the quality to 16 megapixels, but they are still great looking images. Google can save the original high-resolution photos, but you would likely have to purchase storage space from Google.

Before the trip, we each installed the Google Photos app on our phones. It didn’t matter that two of us were on Android and one on iPhone. We turned on the setting to have the app upload our photos to our individual Google accounts when we were on Wifi. That saved us using up data on our data plan.

Just before we left, Google announced shared folders. I created one and invited my son and wife to join. This lets us have an album we all can view.

At the end of the trip, each of us opened our own Google Photo app on our phone and selected the photos we’d taken in Israel. We had the app copy all the photos to our shared folder.

Then as I was creating my blog posts about the trip, I had all the photos the three of us had taken in one spot. Google Photos even let me do some simple editing to my photos. Most of the editing I do to photos is to crop them to improve their composition, and I could do this online in Google Photos.

Once it has your images, it can help you present them to the world. You can create your own folders that you can then share publically.

Google Photos’ assistant feature creates movies and stories from photos automatically. It usually does an amazing job. I’ve put two from other trips in this week’s link post at FamilyTechOnline.com.

With the movies, it assembles photos and videos shot together into a story, with a musical soundtrack. If you do not like the movie it creates, you can create your own on your phone’s app. I created one for our trip.

Other parts of Google Photos have some special powers of their own. Photos uses machine learning and image recognition to identify the people in your photos. I can ask it to show me all the photos I’ve taken of my wife, son or father, for example.

If you let your phone encode the GPS coordinate when you take a photo, Google Photos can show you all the photos you’ve taken in a particular location.

Photos can use that location information to include maps in the stories it creates.

The most important feature of Google Photos is it automatically copies your photos off your phone and into the cloud. Usually when someone loses their phone, or it breaks, the greatest lamentation you hear from them is they have lost all their photos. Google Photos auto backup can save your photos in case of disaster.

Once the photos are in the Google Photos cloud, you can download them to your PC. You can share them with friends and family, and use Google’s machine-made stories and movies of your photos, or make your own.

Seem like a good idea, but a little intimidating? Look for another “How-to” in the link post to help you out.

As I look over the hundreds of photographs we took in Israel, I am pleased to see myself in some of them. Had this trip been done in the 1960s, there might be three of the family photographer. This trip we were all the family photographers and videographers.

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When family members travel together and each take photos, how can we easily consolidate the photos both to keep the photos safe, and to have a complete record of the trip?In the April 22, 2016 Family Tech column, I talk about using Google Photos to meet this need.

Back in March 2013, I wrote a column and how-to solving this problem using Dropbox. The Dropbox solution was likely to require purchased storage space from Dropbox. And Google Photos has a number of advantages now that Dropbox does not have.Google Photos stores photographs up to 16 megapixels for free. If a photo exceeds 16 megapixels, Google can either store it at the original size, and consume your Google Storage, or downgrade the photograph to 16 megapixels.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Before my wife left for Israel, and my son and I visited her, I had to figure out how we could use our cell phones outside the United States.

There are two kinds of cell phone technologies in the world. Here in the U.S., AT&T and T-Mobile use the GSM system while Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. Most of the world outside the U.S. uses the GSM system – think Beta and VHS or AM and FM. They are similar systems, but different.

I checked the specs to our phones by googling the models online. Because my wife bought her iPhone at an Apple store, it was set up to work with both the CDMA and GSM systems. The Android phones my son and I have worked with both systems. Ask your cell company if your phone can work on GSM systems if you cannot find the information online.

Next, check with your provider for advice. Sprint told me it had an international roaming plan I could put on our phones for free. In Sprint’s case, it allowed for unlimited data roaming but at speeds from 10 years ago, 2G technology speeds. That’s pretty slow. It also allowed for phone calls at 20 cents a minute. I asked it to activate its international roaming for our phones so we at least have this capability when we first arrived in Israel.

I also asked it to unlock our phones. When you buy a phone from a provider like Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T, the phones come locked to its system. Phone companies are fearful people might subscribe to a two-year contract, receive a free phone, and then stop paying their bills and sell their phone on eBay. Phones cost well over $500 in most cases, with some close to $1,000. Phone companies subsidize the phone’s cost and we pay for them as part of our monthly charge over the life of our cell phone contracts, often two years.

While the phone is locked, you cannot use it on another carrier’s system.

However, most carriers will unlock your phone if you ask. Your payments need to be up-to-date and you have to have been a customer for a period of time, perhaps as little as 90 days.

By having our phones unlocked, and also able to support the GSM system common in Israel, we were able to buy new SIM cards for our phones. SIM cards are tiny electronic cards in a GSM phone that tell the phone how to access the local cell network. You will probably see kiosks and stores for SIM cards in the airport when you arrive. It is generally a good idea to pass those by and seek out lower-cost SIMs sold at many stores.

My wife found a SIM card provider at the university where she is studying that offers unlimited phone calls in Israel and unlimited data at modern, high speed 3G technology for only $15 a month. Ponder that for a minute and compare it to what you are paying for your cell plan.

Our first day in Tel Aviv we bought SIM cards for our phones and a data plan for a gigabyte of data. That would make our phones as if we’d purchased them from a cell phone provider in Israel, with an Israel-based phone number and all. The salesperson removed our U.S. SIM card and reminded us to save it for our return to the U.S.

The data didn’t come online right away, but we were assured it would recognize the system in about 20 minutes. By the time we returned to our AirBnB hours later, we still did not have data service.

I called tech support and they helpfully had an English-speaking tech call me back. He asked me to check various settings in my phone’s settings app. He kept asking me to find a setting on my phone for “APN Servers.” I could not find it, nor did I even know it existed. After we ended the call, I found out by googling that Sprint, for some reason, had removed that setting from many of its Android phones. I discovered an app in the Google Play store that put it back in. Tech support told me what settings I should enter for APN Servers, and I was soon up and running with fast 3G data.

Links for that app are in this week’s link post at FamilyTechOnline.com.

When I got home, it was a simply a matter of removing the SIM I’d purchased and reinstall the Sprint SIM the salesperson in Israel had removed. I was then back on Sprint in the U.S.

Had our phones not been GSM ready, or Sprint had refused to unlock the phone, many stores overseas will rent you a phone for the duration of your visit.

I didn’t worry about making international calls, or costs of texting. By using Facebook messenger and Whatsapp, we were able to make calls and text to each other, and friends and family back in the U.S., using just the data plan.

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Saturday, April 9, 2016

My wife was selected more than a year ago as a Fulbright Distinguished Teacher. She is in Israel for four months to study how they educate young children with autism and share her knowledge of the subject. The week of spring break, my adult son and I flew over to visit her.

Of course I used technology to make the trip easier and also learned a lot about technology in Israel. What I learned is useful for domestic trips as well. Lessons learned from our whirlwind trip will be inspiration for the next few columns.

I created a folder on the front page of my phone for apps I needed on the trip. The first one was TripIt.

Tripit is a “freemium” service, meaning it is free but with a paid level giving you more features that track your itinerary for you. Once you setup a TripIt account, you simply forward any emails you get from airlines, hotels, rental car companies, etc. and Tripit maintains your itinerary for you. You can track it in its smartphone app. It makes it easy to remember your flight times, gates and other information.

I also added the app from the airline we would be flying. These seem to be constantly improving. We flew on United and its app kept us up-to-date on flight changes and even held our boarding passes for us.

Once in Israel, my wife introduced us to the Moovit app. It turns out that some of the best travel apps are created by Israeli startups. Many of us probably already use Waze, a driving direction app that also allows other drivers to share information about the road, where there are accidents, police and obstacles. Waze is now owned by Google, but it was created by an Israeli team and their offices are still in Tel Aviv. We passed the Google, Microsoft and Intel offices north of Tel Aviv on one of our tours.

The Moovit app works in more than 800 cities in 60 nations. Type in your destination and it gives you the bus, train, ferry and other rapid transit options you have to get there. My wife has been using it since she arrived in Haifa a month ago. She said she appreciates that it tracks where she is while she is on the bus and alerts her as to when she should push the button to alert the driver that she wants the next stop.

One of the options when using Moovit is that it offers a taxi as an option. Moovit uses the Gett Taxi technology to do that. Gett Taxi also has its own app. The app works something like the Uber app but with taxis that subscribe to the service. It finds the closest taxi and tells it where you want to go. Then it tells you when the taxi has accepted the trip and lets you know how soon the taxi will arrive to you, with almost frightening precision.

Gett is in only a few cities now. In the U.S. it works in New York City.

Almost all the taxis and tour buses we were on used Waze to navigate. The national pride in that app is immense. I used it and Google Maps, with which I was more familiar, to track our progress around the city. I had the “Your Timeline” feature turned on in Google Maps. It plotted our path each day. It was fun to review our many travels around the country. It even tracked our walking tour through Jerusalem, but without 100 percent accuracy. Cell coverage in the Old City is not perfect, as you might expect.

I have an Android Watch, and my wife has an Apple Watch. We enjoyed comparing the number of steps each recorded as we took tours each day. If you have a Fitbit or other health tracker, be sure to take it on vacation with you. While I normally only walk 4,000 steps a day, I had a streak going that week. I hit almost 14,000 steps the day we toured Masada. My fitness app had been quite disappointed with me upon my return. I’m not walking nearly as much.

Effective use of our phones required local phone coverage. And travelling with your phone as your primary camera also required some adjustments.

This week’s link post at FamilyTechOnline.com will have links to my online travelogue on the trip if you are interested, and my wife’s blog on her impressions of Israel and the professional experiences she is having there.

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Saturday, April 2, 2016

It has been five years since Google stunned the world by showing how far along it was with its self-driving cars. Suddenly another invention, first seen in science fiction, seemed poised to become real.

During the intervening years we may have settled into the idea that true self-driving cars were still a someday thing.

Fully self-driving cars are not so much going to appear suddenly in dealerships, as gradually enter our lives. In reality, there are cars on the road now with self-driving capabilities.

Readers with some newer, high-priced vehicles already have some self-driving features.

Some cars have auto parallel parking, often called park assist. Ford, Lincoln, BMW, Range Rover, Nissan and Mercedes Benz have this feature. I’d have killed for this when I lived in San Francisco. I wonder if they can parallel park on the other side of the street on a 24-degree downhill. I can.

Autonomous self-driving cars have an extensive sensor array in the cars. These sensor systems are appearing now and are used in some cars not to control the car but warn the driver of conditions. Lane assist warns the driver if they are drifting out of their lane.

The sensors can also warn you if there is something in your blind spot as you are about to move over. Others will slow or stop the car if you approach too closely to the vehicle in front of you.

Active cruise control can slow your vehicle as it approaches cars in front and speed back up as traffic begins moving faster. Think how nice that would be on Interstate 95 creeping north in the morning. You still have to keep your hands on the wheel and actively drive, but it delegates one irritating portion of the effort of the commute to technology.

For a real, honest-to-goodness car moving on its own without a driver, there is the Tesla Summon Mode. Press a button on your Tesla phone app, and your Tesla will back out of your garage or park itself in your garage. It is perfect for people who have cramped garages where it is difficult to get into and out of their vehicles.

Tesla is working toward fully autonomous cars. Its top models have the sensors needed, and it is slowly upgrading its software in the cars to have more self-driving features.

I remember as a kid when high-end cars were the only ones with power windows. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find a car without them. Ultimately these driving-assist features will be available on all cars. For example, manufacturers have agreed to have auto braking on all cars by 2022.

The federal government has been looking into requiring new cars to have vehicle-to-vehicle communications at some point in the future. This would allow a car to broadcast to other cars, “Hey, I’m at this location, moving in this direction at this speed and I weigh this much.”

That way the computer in a car could have better situational awareness than it can gain from sensors alone.

The biggest obstacles to fully self-driving cars will be human drivers. An autonomous car will have a good idea what another autonomous car will do, but human-driven cars will be less predictable.

And a human in the self-driven car may decide they need to take over the driving, and that transition could potentially be dangerous. The person may not have the situational awareness because they have not been paying close attention to the road. Or, they may have had a couple drinks. A Google executive advocates, and Google is testing, a self-driving car without a steering wheel. Mercedes showed a concept car with seating arranged like a living room, with the front seats facing back so the people in the car can converse easily.

Ultimately, there will be mostly self-driving cars. Driving your own car will be akin to riding your own horse.

Uber is already shopping for 100,000 totally autonomous cars. Imaging clicking your Uber app and a car shows up to take you to work? Or have one scheduled to show up at the same time every morning?

Going on vacation? Uber sends an SUV or an RV. Need to make a run to the city dump? They will send a pickup truck. We will not own cars anymore, but instead subscribe to a vehicle sharing group.

And while there may never be roads without accidents and fatalities, 33,000 people die annually on the nation’s roads -- with 94 percent of those accidents being human error. Self-driving cars are going to drive like your grandmother, at the speed limit, politely, non-aggressively, but safer.

And ultimately faster, as situations that lead to congestion won’t occur. Self-driving cars won’t slow to gawk at an accident. The accident is even less likely to be there to gawk at in the first place.

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